Lionhearted
by Chesh Writes
Summary: The world had turned them hard and cynical at such young ages, but perhaps there was a chance that they could heal and love each other. / Raijinshuu story, rewritten version of my old fic, Days We Hold Precious.
1. grandmaster

Hey guys! This is the revamped version of my old fic, _Days We Hold Precious_. I'm working on getting the story rebooted- I have new ideas and have updated some things, since I first published it when I was maybe 14/15-ish? In any case, sorry for those of you who were sad that the old story was taken down, but I hope that this new and improved version will also please you! If you want something to entertain you while between updates, I recommend my 20s AU, _Little Talks_ , or my ElfEver fic, _What the Flowers Whispered_. (I have a weakness for AUs...) Hopefully I'll get more content up soon!

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 _We were walking side by side, just a single step away_

 _I wish I could recall what had made us laugh at all_

 _How I miss the magic of those ordinary days_

\- Amanda Lee, _Medley_

A fire.

That was what had taken them away from Freed. Hot, smothering fire, licking at him, leaving behind trails of flaming red on his flesh, its smoke filling his lungs and dusting his green hair with hot soot. A fire had ripped through the mansion when he was only nine, its causes unknown. It was most likely an accident, officials told a shaken, alone little boy.

An accident.

That was what had taken them away from Freed?

Something so simple as maybe a butler leaving on the stove had ripped his parents away, and all his servants, his family?

He remembered them when he closed his eyes. His mother, a petite, beautiful woman. Her dress was always long and always simple, beautiful, but not made for a woman of her rank. Freed buried his face in her beautiful blonde locks when she read to him. His father, a tall, sturdy man, always dressed in nice pants and a button-up shirt, his green hair trimmed short and neat. He could remember the language lessons given to him, the clap on the back he received from his father as he improved after each and every session.

The mansion was filled to the brim with books of every sort- cook books, language books, magic books. His parents were collectors of fine things, and books were amongst their favorite to buy off of traveling merchants. Freed spent most of his days in the library until his mother had to remind him it was time to eat, bathe, or have his lessons, but she tended to also become enraptured by whatever he was reading and would hide in there with him until his father came to look for them and also became promptly interested.

That's what they had been doing that morning, hiding from the staff in the library with armloads of books and pens and papers, researching everything and nothing to their heart's content. A maid had given up on ever getting them out and had left sandwiches and tea on the table, a huffy expression on her face, but also a look of fondness in her eyes.

It was hard to stay mad at the Justines. They were a charming people.

The day was so normal: The books, the laughter, the exasperated staff, the tall mansion. All of it was so normal, all of it he took for granted. He remembered every detail of the library, down to the way it smelled, like ink and dust. He remembered the way the hallways looked, lit up with chandeliers and set with long and foreign rugs. He remembered his own room, big and, _surprise_ , filled with books and paper and whatever else he loved or wanted.

The smell of smoke in particular was strong in his memory. He'd fallen asleep while reading a book on the history of taming wyverns and was woken up by the uncomfortable scent in his nostrils. It was putrid, dank, and burned.

It was fire, and when he ran out into the hallway, the flames reached for him like demons crawling up from hell and forced him down the other hall, where more greeted him. It was hot, so painfully hot, and his skin was drying out at a rapid pace. It was peeling back and revealing burning red flesh that stung even more whenever a flame approached him.

The air was thick with smoke that hurt to breath in. It muffled the sounds of people throughout the estate who were wailing and screaming and begging for a god, any god at all, to save them. He heard lots of people as he stumbled through: the maid, the cook, the librarian, their gardener, but he did not hear his parents, and he did not know where to look for them or if he even could, the way things were going. His eyes were burning uncontrollably, he was running out of oxygen, and the flames were spreading more rapidly and verging on the last way he had to escape. Everywhere else was filled with flames. This hallways was the last one.

Freed had a choice: He could either head down the path he was on and look for his parents in the library, or he could escape.

It was an unbearable choice.

Time slowed as he reasoned with himself: If he hadn't heard or seen them at this point, they were probably outside. They were his parents- they couldn't die. That wasn't how it worked. They had to be outside. Yes, that was right- they'd gone for a walk in the gardens when he'd run off to his room to read. They would've escaped easily. Now it was up to him to get out on his own and find them.

But that wasn't what happened.

The army men pulled him up as soon as he came out of the mansion and collapsed; he hacked, coughed, and finally vomited up saliva and ash and they took him away, right to the edge of the courtyard, where he could completely see the red blaze and the building crumble into bits of brick and wood that smoldered and caught the ground on fire, too.

Freed didn't see his parents. He didn't see anyone familiar. There were only bustling people in army uniforms running around, yelling, and mages sending bursts of water towards the manor and extinguishing what they could. He didn't see his mother's long golden hair or his father's stiff and unyielding stature. At least, he didn't see them immediately.

He saw them later, saw their burned bodies as the army dragged them out of the mansion. They were unrecognizable. Chunks of flesh gone from their bright red arms. Their hair incinerated. Eyes, oh their eyes, melting out of their heads.

He didn't realize he was screaming until his throat was raw and broken.

An army advisor had covered his eyes with her hand, whispering in the sobbing boy's ear. Freed felt her wrap a warm, thick, white coat around him and taking his hand, then saying:

 _Would you like to come with me?_

Freed barely muttered an affirmative, his throat still wrecked, and she took his hand and guided him away from the smoldering mansion.

Her name was Adilah, and she was the most incredible thing Freed had ever seen. Tall and dark, broad-shouldered and muscular, beautiful amber eyes, and oh so very smart. Her specialty in the army, he learned soon after going with her, was making runes. She was one of the generals in the rune mage unit of the imperial army.

Everyone loved Adilah. Her subordinates frequently came to her house in Crocus after work to give her reports and listen to her speak. Soon after Freed began living with her, they took a liking to him, too. They let him sit in and listen while they talked about strategy and mission reports and politics.

The squad was consisted of nine other people- four men and five other women. All of them were young for their stations- prodigies, the older knights called them. Even their superiors looked up to their skill and talent, and they were expected to go far. Freed had to say that he also admired them. They were strong, unyielding, and intelligent and everything he wanted to be.

Crocus was good. There were lots of people to talk to when he went shopping, good schools, a castle he could look at every night before he went to bed, and best of all, there was his foster mother with her books and her knights and sword.

After a few years had passed, his foster mother asked if he wanted to take a government exam for runes, seeing as he had a talent for the little spells she showed him. If he passed, he could easily become a Rune Knight like her when he reached the minimum age. His writing was precise, clean, and he had the mind of a professional. Her squad speculated that he would someday surpass them, particularly a tall man with slick purple hair- Carver. He always told Freed that one day he would surpass Adilah, and that he eagerly awaited the day it would happen.

Every day was studying. Even when Adilah was at work and he had the freedom to do whatever he wanted under no supervision, he studied. Long-handed runes, short-handed ones, everything from the most complex to simple. Her personal library was overflowing with books on word magic and he didn't stop until he'd memorized every last bit.

Runes were control. They were firm and strict and abided by the rules, just as everything should. They did what you wanted, only when you wanted it, and had so many uses: Destruction, protection, preservation, power. Freed loved them. He loved rules, and he loved control.

Adilah was a merciless teacher- she drilled him every second she was home, even while they cooked dinner together. She made worksheets and tests of every kind and brought him into work to watch recruits train, struggle, and sweat. They all said he would be a great rune knight, one of the best the country had ever seen, much like his foster mother herself.

He didn't shrivel and collapse under the expectations- he thrived under them.

The first exam on long-handed runes rolled around and, at almost-thirteen, he was the youngest in the exam hall. The older examiners looked at him with sneers and jabbed their thumbs at him when they thought he wasn't looking, and some even asked him where his mother was in taunting voices. The proctors didn't take him seriously and made a big show of handing him his test and asking him if all his pencils were sharpened. Freed desperately wanted to punch them all where it hurt.

His overwhelming victory was much more satisfying than their physical pain, however. The looks on their faces when the proctors, tight-jawed and sweating, announced that he had received the highest score in years, and by a landslide at that, was sweet and refreshing.

In the physical test, his runes were stronger than anyone else's and lasted the longest. The others muttered and glared at him, and some even swallowed their pride and asked him what his secret was, while the proctors whispered that he was a prodigy unseen since Adilah herself, and when they told her this when she came to pick him up, she ruffled his hair and laughed loudly.

The next exam was three months after his birthday. The physical portion of the short-handed test was a lot more consuming, the squad told him as they gathered for their weekly dinner at their house. While long-handed took longer to set up, you had the time to set them up properly and ensure that they were quality, but in short-handed runes, you had to write the spells as fast as possible. You had to contain staged explosions, contain raging beasts, amongst a many other things. This exam would take less bookwork and more experience.

Every day he practiced, drawing in the air with his finger as fast as possible, but the runes came out sloppy and fell apart easily without a firm stroke to guide them. But he still had three more months. He could do it. The squad would help him whenever they came after work, and sometimes he and Adilah would stay up late into the night catching fireflies in small rune containers as "practice."

The day came much too fast; Freed felt like he had a whole horde of bees trying to wiggle their way up his throat and out of his stomach. Short-hand was much harder than long-hand, despite all the practice he'd had. Still, all he had to do was pass, right? He'd already proven he was a prodigy in the last exam. Then again, that set up high expectations for him from both his fellow examinees and the proctors. Maybe they would laugh at him if he got a low score.

A mission came in the morning of the exam- Adilah dropped him off on the steps of the exam building, gave him a tight hug and a kiss on the forehead, and was off after telling him she'd be there when he got out at the end of the day and they would do something special. She vanished into the bustling Crocus crowd, gone into the crowds of people carrying flowers and playing music and shopping. He watched until the very tip of her knight's coat and sword scabbard were gone, turned on his heel, and walked stiffly up the stairs and into the building.

He almost lost his eyebrows when he had to contain an explosion caused by a fire mage, and the tiger he had to restrain almost took a chunk out of his hand. His runes held strong, however, and he held his own against whatever was thrown against him. He thought about Adilah- had she been so nervous in her exams? Or had she, as a prodigy, had such great confidence that nothing phased her?

Well, he was a prodigy, too.

The scores came back at the end of the day when every test-taker was sweaty, covered in dirt, and sleeping in the hallways. A sorry few did not pass the examination at all, while some breathed heavy-sighs of relief at their just-passing scores. Freed swallowed and crossed his fingers when they began to read of the top three. There was a Dana Fox with the third-highest score, a Mako Yukimaru with the second, and so-!

Freed had passed with flying colors. The people cheered and shook him around in excitement until even his bones hurt, and all he could think about was how Adilah was waiting outside and would be ecstatic to hear that every second of hard work had paid off.

But she wasn't outside waiting for him, so he sat down on the steps, holding his certification, and waited for her. Her mission was going on for a really long time for something that was just in the forests outside of the capital.

He waited fifteen minutes, thirty minutes, forty, fifty, an hour, and then an hour-and-a-half, and that's when he started to worry. When he saw one of the Council's large lizard henchmen heading towards his direction, he convinced himself that they were going to go take a left, but when they didn't, he assured himself that certainly they were just heading for the exam building, and then his heart stopped when the lizard stopped in front of him and looked down at him with a quizzical and almost sad look.

Adilah was not going to come home.

The mission had been a setup, created by a member of her squad, nonetheless. Carver. It had been him, the Carver who ate at his house once a week, the Carver who helped him with his studying, the man who ruffled his hair and laughed at everyone's jokes. He had stabbed her in the back, literally and metaphorically, and left the others to a dark guild to die.

They never found him, but they found the bodies of the other nine, freshly dead and bleeding with their swords and knives still clutched firmly in their hands up until the end. They brought Freed back her shining white coat, it's only blemish the thin rip where the blade had gone in and the smears of blood around it.

The prospect of becoming a Rune Knight had soured. He put away his certifications somewhere deep into his bags when he packed them up. He refused to stay in the home where his mother's murderer had walked. Not two, but three parents he had lost, and it stung just as bad as when the first two had left him.

He made way for a guild in a town only a week away, if he went on foot. Fairy Tail was what it was called. He remembered Adilah going on about it, how she thought the guild was outstanding, but that rowdy new members were joining it recently and creating trouble for the Council. It seemed like a good option. The Master there accepted the solemn boy readily, even picked out some jobs that would suit him upon seeing the credentials from the Council that he presented upon arriving. They were very kind there, and their library had so many books that he could potentially spend days on end sitting in an arm chair and not leaving the room.

His daily routine was boring. The sleepy town of Magnolia was nothing like Crocus. You woke up, went to the guild, checked for work, read, and then went to bed. He longed for those Crocus days where they played games and studied together and laughed. Those days were starting to feel like a daydream, one that taught him that people weren't trustworthy. They stabbed each other in the back when presented the opportunity. Did they even need a reason? Eventually his only companions were his books.

Humans became good again the day he met him.


	2. knight

**A/N** : Sorry this chapter took so long, and thanks to all of you who said nice things and followed! I'm really glad that lots of people have decided to follow from DWHP. There's also more of a personal narrative tone here rather than a general narrative from the last one because Bickslow's personality just. really loves to shine through.

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"If only I'd known how to save a life."

\- _How to Save a Life_ , The Fray

Everybody loved Bickslow in that small village. Especially the kids. He was tall for his age, strong, and didn't ever stand for injustice towards anyone. He protected them from bullies. He was just like a knight, and everyone was fond of him and they were fond of his parents, who were popular far and wide.

They did puppet shows, and Bickslow had to really think to find something better than it. They did everything themselves and worked day-in and day-out. They made the scenery out of felt and scraps of wood, and carved little characters out of wood and sewed them from elegant cloth. The kids loved it when he ran out to them and showed them what he'd been working on, and he loved it when they insisted he do the funny voices and show them what the next show was going to be.

Man, he loved hearing people laugh.

He was content. He and his family lived comfortably. Lots of people came far and wide to see their famous puppet shows. He loved getting underneath those wooden stages that he made with his own two hands, his own work, and he loved making the puppets dance and be someone he wasn't. It was the ultimate form of pretend. He could be anyone under that stage

Bickslow loved it. He loved everyone. He loved everything.

He loved his father, a tall man with piercing green eyes and messy black hair, who had a penchant for forgetting his work tools at the most critical of moments. Bickslow suspected that he'd gotten his scattery personality from him. He also loved his mother, who was taller still and had curling navy hair that tickled his nose whenever she leaned in for a hug. Her work was always neat and smooth, and she was no novice when it came to painting sceneries. His mother's hand was always so warm and guiding whenever she held it to help him create a nice, neat stroke on a background for their next show.

He really loved those kids who always came tumbling to meet him whenever he stepped outside. There was a young boy about six with brown hair. An adorable eight-year-old redhead girl. A set of triplets, each identical with freckles and blond hair and mischievous grins. There were more, of course, but those five were always there, and always treated him like a big brother, and they were at every single puppet show.

He stopped loving things, though. Stopped loving them on the day that everything tumbled to the ground and shattered, just like an expensive vase in the homes of nobility that he frequently visited to entertain their children. Shattered. Just like that. Into clean, crisp pieces that would cut you if you held them too hard.

A dark guild stormed the community, gone mad with bloodlust, screaming to one another about Zeref and an R-System, and blood flew left and right. There were children too frightened to scream as their parents were rendered headless in front of them, parents who screeched to their deaths as children who were too young were pummeled into mush, and Bickslow wanted to vomit when an ax was buried in the shoulder of his father and blood sprayed high into the air and came down like rain.

A man tried to rip him from his mother's arms while she screamed, and when he bit so deeply into his arm that blood started to gush into his mouth, the man howled, shook him off, and pointed a crossbow at him. The end of the arrow was so sharp that while Bickslow stared at it, he was certain he was already feeling the pain in anticipation. He clenched his eyes shut, took in the last sounds of his mother screaming, and braced for the pain.

There was the sound of the crossbow firing.

It didn't come.

He waited some more.

It didn't come. The pain. It didn't. What did come was a hot spray of blood on his face and the taste of iron just barely on his lips.

Slowly, really slowly, he opened up his eyes. At first, there was only an indistinct shape, kneeling in front of him as his eyes readjusted. The shape soon made itself out to be his mother, her favorite pink dress torn and ripped and stained with a bleeding red. An arrow was lodged in her chest and stuck so far out that the end almost touched his nose. She choked, a stream of blood came out of her mouth, and she collapsed after only a second. The arrow in her chest lodged itself in his waist when she fell atop him.

He didn't scream when it stabbed him.

He screamed when he felt a burning on his face, much hotter than the blood, and felt his eyes scorch. The pain was so intense. It was magma. It was the sun. It was bliss. The pain felt so wrong, but so good.

There was the indistinct screaming of people around him, the sounds of fire ravaging the village, and he passed out atop his mother to the sounds of terror.

When he woke up, the sky was gray and wet and hid the moon. There was blood in his mouth and the rain on his face stung in the most comforting way possible. His mother's body was still below him, and he rolled her over and put a stray curtain that had whisked itself over to them on top of her so that she wouldn't be cold. The man with the crossbow was dead only a few feet away. Bickslow put a broken piece of wood through his chest.

The remnants of the village were strewn with the dead. Every dark guild member seemed to have killed themselves. There was glass in their throats, arrows in their chests, and some looked like they had pummeled their own heads against walls until they died.

As he walked about, soldiers ran around him, yelling to one another and holding their lances close. They did not see the young boy walk through the mud, didn't see him walk past and gather the bodies of the children whom he'd loved and who had loved him, and they didn't notice when he searched to and fro when he heard familiar voices in his ear. They only took him as an afterthought, dragging him away from the ruins and bodies as he yelled and thrashed around.

They took pity on him and seemed to find something odd about him. They gave him a place to stay at a base near the ocean. It was pretty nice- he had to take quite the walk to get into town, though. And his room was dull, with dull navy wallpaper, a tiny bookshelf and desk, and a bed with blankets that were so thick they were uncomfortable. One of the older members at the base, a sweet old woman, gave him a small ball, much like one he'd had as a kid. He spent most of his time throwing it up at the ceiling and waiting for it to come back and hit him in the face.

Bickslow would've rather been back home.

The Council treated him like a fascinating subject and kept him close at hand. He had been the only one left in the ruins of a massacre, after all, and there was something very _weird_ about that. He had a "disgusting feeling" around him, a Chairwoman said while she circled him like a vulture searching for pickings. That big black tattoo on his face was also obscene; what kind of parent would let an impressionable boy get that?

Sure, sure, pick on the poor orphan boy, why didn't she?

The big black "tattoo" had the vague appearance of a person. A person who was long and bulky and made of squares, actually. He didn't notice it until the Council had pointed it out and he immediately looked in a mirror to poke and prod at it. It didn't have the same sheen of ink that his father's tattoos had had. It looked just like _skin_. Only after it was pointed out to him did he realize that it still seared when he touched it.

It definitely wasn't a tattoo.

Could this have been the cause of the boiling pain from back then?

In any case, it set him apart. When he left his room to go out shopping or to exercise, everyone moved out of his way. Council members shuffled past him quickly and sometimes pulled their hoods up to avoid his gaze. They whispered about him, how he was "off," about the disgusting feeling he radiated. He was the survivor of a massacre that had started to make the history books, and wasn't that just the oddest thing, that he only came out of it with an odd marking and a few scratches while everyone else was dead and bloody?

He could never hear those whispers above the ones that were always groaning in his ear. Sometimes they even screamed. He'd thought that they would go away soon after the massacre. He thought they had just been a lingering after effect of the trauma.

They scared him. Sometimes they sounded like his mother, but mostly they sounded like those kids that he'd loved. They talked to him constantly, screaming in were a constant echo in his mind, and he felt like he was going out of his mind after a month, two months, then three. He smashed pillows against his head, curled up and jammed his ears shut, yelled to drown out the sounds, but the voices were just _there_. They wouldn't go away.

What the hell what the hell what the _hell_ was happening to him? What had he done to be punished like this? Hadn't he suffered enough?

Even when he went to the ocean, dunked his head under the water, they followed him and talked and talked and never _ever_ shut up. Was he going insane? Was he really going mad? Had the massacre finally caught up with him?

Maybe he really was mentally damaged, just like the psychiatrist and therapist and everyone else tried to tell him.

Maybe he really was going crazy from grief at last.

Great. Just _great_.

Eventually, an alternative to insanity presented itself in the form of a batch of books. The Council suggested that, since he showed no discernable skills beyond carving wood and had no motivation for anything, he learn magic. The same old vulture woman from months before brought him stacks and stacks of books and tomes. They were on all sorts of magic: Fire _(boring)_ , water _(too not-him)_ , celestial _(complicated_ and _weird)_ , lost magics _(not unless he wanted to become even more of a freak)_.

Black Magic.

Now _that_ sounded interesting.

Seith Magic: The ability to manipulate and connect with various forms of souls. To those with a natural inclination to the magic, souls of the deceased would cling to them in desperation.

Maybe that was it.

Maybe he wasn't insane. He wasn't making up the voices. The voices, those poor souls that he found himself having immense pity for, were just what was left of the dead and damned. And maybe it was wrong, maybe he was just reaching, but maybe, just maybe, these were the souls of people who had lived in that village with him. Maybe they were even those kids who'd been dumb enough to love a creepy kid like him.

The souls must've been cold, he thought. Lonely. They'd been floating around him for months at that point. They needed a place to stay. They'd suffered enough and he'd keep them safe from then on. The people in the base looked at him a bit (or a lot) oddly when he asked for as much wood and paint and lacquer as they could give him, but nobody ever wanted to make Bickslow mad. They were all too scared to do so. He was scary and creepy, after all.

His dreary room began to look almost like home had.

Very heavy emphasis on " _almost_."

The studying desk turned into a crafting desk covered with carving tools and stained with paint. The bookshelves became tool shelves as he swept all the books off and lovingly put each tool in its own place. Cans of paint and lacquers, some tipped over, littered the room carelessly. Piles of wood and chunks of scraps were scattered around, and he picked them up as he pleased.

Now _this_ was the stuff.

The base members looked inside at his back, hunched over the desk, frequently and always muttered about the mess. When were they going to be getting rid of him again? That time just wouldn't come soon enough. That disgusting feeling around him was just getting stronger and stronger and he was a hassle to have around.

Screw them. He was a damn _delight_.

The voices became more than voices one day. He woke up and on his trek into town to get a hot breakfast, when a particularly chattery voice in his ear stopped and there was a shimmer ahead of him. He blinked, squinted, blinked again, but it was still there- the vague shape of a young child, mostly transparent, wobbly, and green. It hovered towards him, reached out for his hand, though it passed uselessly through, and the voice began to chatter about nothing once more.

Great. Now he could _see_ them.

He started to see the shimmers and gleams inside of people, too. The baker's soul was a dark purple and fluttered warmly inside his chest. The librarian's was silver and tiny, curled up in a shy manner.

Kinda cool. Only kinda, though. It made it really distracting and hard to work on his projects. But it was nice to be able to look at a person and see something warm… something fluttering and soft. It was also nice to look at people with heavy, black souls that burst around wildly and know he had to stay away from them.

It took a long time, a really long time, but eventually the first puppet came along nicely. He'd intended to make it bigger, but he'd made too many mistakes and had settled on making it a small, rounded square. It lacked character, though…

He put wings on it. What in the world had more character than wings? Nothing. Wings were the freakin' _best_.

It'd be weird to put the souls inside something without a face. Bickslow knew he'd hate not having a face, so he drew and painted one on, a happy little smiling face with a quirked and mischievous smile.

The whispers in his ears turned from dreary and agonized to curious as he worked, and when he finally started talking back and telling them about what he was doing, they began to sound very happy and excited. They chirped his words back to him eagerly and even learned to imitate his laugh. Sometimes they would even quiet down while he worked and gave him peace and quiet for the first time in over a year. They began to speak individually and he was able to count out five distinct voices.

 _(There had been five kids who loved him.)_

That meant five puppets.

He created all of them slowly, carefully, with even and expert strokes and eventually had a complete and matching set. They were stout, the size of his head, and painted festively. He made them look alike but gave them different faces so that way he could learn to distinguish between them. If they were never going to leave him alone, he should at least be able to identify them so he could tell them specifically to shut up whenever he couldn't hear himself think.

It took a while to reason with the souls and convince them to take up residence inside the vessels, but he did his best. They'd be safe there. They'd be warm and happy. Bickslow'd take good care of them, so, really, they should go into the puppets. He'd take care of them. He would. Honestly.

Once they did, the constant voices stopped. When they did talk, it was only to repeat him and laugh at his dumb jokes. He could no longer clearly see the gleams of the souls, though the shimmer remained around the puppets. A week after they'd settled in, they began to hover and fly around, thoroughly shocking everyone.

Denis from the weapons department fainted the first time he saw them zipping around. Gertrude from the library department had a heart attack later the same day she discovered them, but Bickslow convinced himself that, no, it hadn't really been _his_ fault, and even if it was, it had been a _small_ heart attack. She was fine. And besides, she liked to smack his hands with a ruler whenever he put them on her desk, so no, she was not going to get sympathy from him.

On Bickslow's fifteenth birthday, over a year after the massacre and soon after he'd began seriously developing his magic, the Council let him go and advised him to become part of a guild and become a proper and professional mage. Basically, this was Council Speak for "You're-annoying-and-we-don't-want-to-be-associated-with-you."

Despite their eagerness to get rid of him, they took time to tell him to absolutely not go to Fairy Tail, because it was rowdy and improper and not the right place for someone with his talents and who had been in the official custody of the Magic Council to cultivate his magic.

He went to Fairy Tail.

What could he say? He loved to piss those old weirdos off.

Everyone stared the day he walked into the guildhall with shrieking blocks of decorated wood zipping around his head. Their jaws may as well have been just sitting on the ground. The master of the guild seemed impressed with him and took him in immediately, particularly upon learning that he had kind-of-sort-of joined the guild for the sake of pissing the Council off.

Oh man, people who liked to piss of the Council? Definitely his kind of people.

He cultivated his magic well under the instruction of dozens of books on black magic in the guild's library. People leaned away from him at the tables when they saw his books on the subject. Sometimes they just up and left.

Sure, it may have been black magic, but he couldn't see those innocent little-kid souls inside his puppets as anything dark and malicious. They were helping him do good. They were excellent at helping apprehend the bad guys from his jobs, so he shrugged off their fear and wariness. There was nothing "evil and creepy," as they were wont to say, about his babies.

The puppets followed him and sang songs with him, played hide-and-seek, and helped him whenever and wherever, even if it was to clean a high shelf in his apartment. Nobody else really wanted to talk to him. Maybe it was because he laughed too loud, let his tongue hang out of his mouth, or maybe it was because of the big black tattoo on his face. But if they didn't want to talk to him? It was their loss. Bickslow was hilarious, clever, and strong. It wasn't like he was longing for a person with flesh and bone to come along and be his friend, no sir, not at all. He wasn't waiting to connect with someone he could touch. He was fine with just the blocks of wood and their constant echos.

But he did. He found an actual, real person.

He met him.


	3. soldier

**A/N:** So Evergreen is literally? my favorite fictional character. she is the small child of my heart. i will protect her.

In any case, there's going to be this backstory, then next will probably be a shorter drabble about Laxus, and then main story! :3c agony awaits.

* * *

"I need to save you, but who's going to save me?"

\- _Remember You_ , Rebecca Sugar

* * *

Evergreen hadn't looked at a person directly in years. Or, rather, she had, but none of them had lived too long after that. And their faces were always masks of fear- stiff and screaming until their final breaths.

How terrifying.

Whenever she went out into town, people threw rocks at her. Not even like the little pebbles that she liked to collect in her skirts. Big, hulking rocks the size of her father's fist, and when they came away from her head, they tended to have spots of red on them. Sometimes it was her blood, sometimes it belonged to one of her parents, who were always more than willing to throw themselves on the blade for their only child.

They had never told her when her curse had developed. Not ever. It had been there for as long as she could remember, but Evergreen was certain she hadn't been born with it. That would've been wrong. Her parents would be dust in the wind already if that was the case. But they had always told her since she could remember that she couldn't look in anyone's eyes or they would turn into stone. Her parents were always so earnest. Their voices always shook whenever they said those things to her. They were regretful. They felt like they were horrible people.

They weren't. It was her who was horrible. She must have done something wrong.

She was bad. For sure, that was true.

Her parents were good people. They were well-liked. That was, when she wasn't around. Her father was a prominent lawyer in their town. Tall, dark red hair, and brilliant brown eyes. Or so she heard. She would sneak out of the house sometimes and watch him through a secluded window of the courthouse when he was the midst of a big case. He would scold her, but he always seemed pleased that she took such an interest in his work.

Everyone said she'd look just like her mother when she grew up. She would have long curled hair, smooth and fair skin, and a shapely body. Maybe she would even develop the spray of freckles that went across her mother's face. She would always be lacking those spring-colored eyes, though, the color of fresh spring grass. She wished she had those eyes. They were kind, soothing. Evergreen liked looking at the painting of them.

Evergreen heard the whispers about her whenever she went to town. Her parents had had a hard time conceiving and traded a normal child for a monster one. Her mother had been cursed before her daughter was born. That a demon had eaten the real child long ago and taken her place.

Was she a demon? Maybe. It wouldn't have surprised her.

The most frightening night of her life was when she was five. She'd been woken up by the sound of a fist on their door. Her mother pulled her out of bed and into her arms. There was shouting outside. Her father went out while she and her mother hid in a closet in the back of the house. People were screaming so loud. They were very angry.

 _Let us kill the demon, Adam. That's not your daughter, Adam. Let us help you. Let us get rid of it. It'll kill us all one day._

Her mother had held her tighter and cried.

They stayed there all night. When her father came back in in the morning, he had a black eye and a short scratch on his face, but was otherwise unharmed.

A year later, he had allowed Evergreen to accompany him into town, as he always did every now and then. She was always required to hold his hand and keep her eyes trained on the road and only talk to him, only focus on him. It was dangerous for her to draw attention to herself.

She counted the stones thrown at her, the bitter comments while her father shopped. She didn't know why, but the comments hurt worse than usual that day. The bumps from the rocks that managed to hit her throbbed worse than ever. She wanted to scream. She wanted people to stop jeering at her and her father. She wanted to stop being a monster.

They kept talking about her: _What an ugly thing, with that hair in it's face. Poor Adam, so deluded by it. It needs to die. I don't want it near my son. It's just the worst. If it dies, it'll make my day_.

The next stone thrown at her did it. Evergreen ripped her hand from her father's grip and ran, ignoring his shouts. She didn't know where she was running to. She just wanted to get there fast, and she was certain she would never leave that place once she got there. She wouldn't go back.

She only stopped when she stumbled over a rock and went sprawling, hitting a tree trunk. Something under her squeaked and she jumped, scrambling back to find something small and shimmery where she had just been laying. Its skin was brown and warm; silver wings sprouted from its back.

Wings.

A fairy. And it was bleeding. It wasn't afraid of her. It looked up at her and asked in a weak, weak voice if she could help. Her home was just over the next hill. She would guide her there if only the little girl would please help her home.

Evergreen did what was natural for any wonderstruck six-year-old to do. She picked up the fairy gently and carried it, going wherever she was directed. A fox had gotten to her, the little thing explained. She hadn't been looking and a fox had scratched her, as creatures were wont to do to small and glittering things. The fairy's cheeks turned blue. She was embarrassed.

It was quite the hike for the little girl, but she cleared the hill. She went past three boulders that the fairy directed her to. There was a hollow log covered with a curtain of lichens that she inched through. When she came out, there was a beautiful place waiting for her. The grass was the color of her mother's eyes. In the center of the clearing, there was what looked like a shrine surrounded by the clearest water in the world, topped with lily pads and water flowers.

It was pretty. So pretty.

The fairy weakly lifted herself up and took off with a breathy thank you. She stumbled in her flight, but managed to make it across the water just fine. The water looked so tempting, and she wanted to follow the fairy in her awe; she stepped towards it and leaned in, and she was underwater the next second with hands pulling at her hair and yanking her further down, so deep, and she wanted to scream but hands were shoving themselves all over her face and silencing her. It was getting darker. Her lungs had stopped burning and were instead heavy. Bubbles swirled around her as whatever was holding her swished around.

She was going to die. She was going to drown to the bottom of this little lake and nobody would ever find her. Today, she was going to make someone's day.

One last puff of air from her lungs and the world went black.

. . .

. . .

There was a soft voice in the distance. Muffled, like it was coming from above the water. Something that sounded vaguely like, _Bring her_. Her body felt light as air as she was pulled from the lake, something shoving her up in a reluctant motion. Water dripped from her hair and she coughed up mouthfuls of the stuff. Her body was still heavy, she was still certain that she was dead, and she could barely feel warm fingers pulling her away from the water.

 _What is it?_

 _A girl. Human. The naiads got to her when she came too close._

 _She didn't feel like a human girl when she was bringing me here._

 _True. And what a shame… A shame for such a sweet little thing to be so heavily cursed._

The voices were like silk. Evergreen felt vaguely reminded of her mother, especially when a warm hand landed on her forehead, pulling wet and silken strands out of her face. She definitely was dead. This had to be an angel. The feeling was so unnatural and warm and soothing, unlike anything she'd ever felt in her life.

 _I think it's waking up._

She's waking up. _She is not an it._

 _Apologies, Your Majesty._

 _Your Majesty_? What was going on? Was she dead? Or wasn't she? She just didn't want the angel to stop caressing her face.

When she opened her eyes, water streamed out and they burned. She could barely make out the figure kneeling and leaning over her- slim, definitely, and probably tall. The facial features were still blurry, but her skin was fair and she had silver hair that looked like it was slicked back. Hovering next to her was something small- the fairy she had returned.

Her lungs were still heavy and hot. When she tried to talk, she only coughed out more water, and she could only stare and watch the woman come more into focus. She was most certainly the most beautiful thing Evergreen had ever seen. More beautiful than even the fairest flower in any garden. Extraordinary.

The exquisite woman only smiled, leaned down, and gave Evergreen a delicate peck on the lips and whispered, _It's alright. Go to sleep again. I'll take care of you from now on._

Evergreen didn't exactly have a choice in the matter. As if by magic, her eyes closed on their own, her body felt light and clean again, and she went under. When she woke up next, she was back in the forest, nice and dry, and had sticks and leaves in her hair. The moon filtered through the leaves- night had come, and she briefly worried about how long she had been unconscious, but it quickly changed to fear when she heard footsteps clambering through the woods.

In the end it was only her parents, both of them looking very frazzled, distressed, and massively relieved to see her. It was obvious that they'd been searching high and low for her for hours, and there she was, unharmed and groggy. They took her back home with her still marvelling and trying to make sense of her encounter- it had to have been a dream, and nothing more.

To her delight, however, she found it was not a dream. Sometimes, when she looked out her window, there were flashes of color, the shimmering of wings, and a little hand waving to her as it flew away, having left behind something like an interesting rock or sweet fruit.

Fairies were real. They looked at her. She loved them. And the woman she had seen was certainly, most definitely, a queen, though she never saw her after. Why would someone so grand and beautiful waste time on her? It was already miraculous that the ordinary ones were willing to interact with her.

When she expressed the fact that fairies were real and they indeed brought her fun objects, her parents couldn't help but laugh at the delusions. Ever kept it to herself, though was pleased to find that the books her father brought her after that had heavy emphasises on fae mythology and beautiful pictures. None of the depictions of Titania came close to what she had seen back in the forest, though. None of them had those gold eyes and fluffy hair, nor did they look so warm and soft.

Disappointing.

A year later, she was seven, and she was finally put over the edge. The violence towards her had increased a drastic amount. Her father didn't take her into town anymore. People walked past their yard and spat at them. A stone crashed through their window one time. Evergreen wasn't allowed to leave the yard and her mother constantly worried.

She spent most of her time taking care of the flowers in the garden and looking for the flashes of color that signified the arrival of her friends, though they barely ever spoke to her. Fairies were kind, but a bit quiet, she had discovered. They preferred to watch rather than talk. That was fine, though. She just liked looking at them. They liked to watch from afar while she made flower crowns.

Making flower crowns was what she was doing on a horrible, awful day when two men entered the yard. Evergreen didn't hear them, didn't notice them, until they were right behind her. One of them grabbed her hair and pulled it tight, lifting her from the ground, and they let her scream however much she wanted. They were enjoying themselves.

 _Disgusting._

Her mother was inside, but Evergreen had to wonder if she would hear her daughter. She hoped that she would, because for all her built tolerance to pain, she wasn't sure how many more rocks she could take to the head, and she was certain she wouldn't survive a swing from the wooden club one of them was carrying.

Sure enough, her mother came running, picking up stones and throwing them at the men. One of them landed hard enough on one of their temples that the skin broke and bled, dripping down onto the sobbing girl. What happened next was too fast, much too horrible. Her mother scooped her up, tried to run, but was tripped by one of the swearing men. And then it was her fault- she just took one look, a really small look, up at the assaulters, but she didn't know that he was looking right at her.

He was rock soon enough, and shortly after that, dust in the wind.

Evergreen squeaked, clutched to her mother a bit tighter, and nearly threw up at the sickening sound that came when the wooden club hit her mother so hard that it turned her head. A splash of blood hit Evergreen's nose. Her mother fell silently. Her father arrived only seconds later, and she heard flesh on flesh as he tackled the man and wrestled with him on the ground.

Her mother woke up two days later with only a throbbing headache and a scar on the side of her head, much to the relief of Evergreen and her father. The man had been put in jail. The other one had become pebbles in their front yard. She had murdered again, and people were becoming restless. They threw nails and other sharp things at her in the weeks following. She bled every day when rocks came soaring and crashing through her window. Her mother looked more worried than ever. Her father always hugged them a bit tighter before he left for work.

They weren't safe with her there. She was Medusa, just like they screamed at her. A demon in disguise. Even the curls of her hair began to look like snakes.

No, she didn't hate these people anymore. She hated herself, more than she had ever hated them.

She left them in the middle of the night a short time later with a loaf of bread, a few apples, and a change of clothes in her bag, and she headed for who-knew-where and tried not to think about how her parents might cry. The thought was too unbearable.

Being on her own was difficult. She couldn't work often because she couldn't look anyone in the eye. She couldn't steal because she was too weak. She never had anywhere comfortable or proper to sleep, though sleeping on the grass wasn't so bad. It was soft and smelled nice, and sometimes when she woke up, there would be clusters of berries or nuts on top of her bag that had been left for her in the middle of the night. It wasn't all that bad. People weren't throwing rocks at her all the time. She liked that.

Evergreen thought she had known loneliness back home, but it was nothing compared to what she felt as she curled up in the middle of the night next to a flimsy fire and was left to her own thoughts. Sometimes she would curl her fingers and press her fingernails to the soft flesh of her eyes and consider plucking out the cursed things, but the pain of trying was just too extreme.

 _Demon. Monster. Death is too kind for you_.

She drowned in hate. She breathed fear. Sometimes she'd be pushed to do that _thing_ and people would scream and rough her up and force her away before she was ready to leave. Some saw her as opportunistic and sought after her, seeking her rare "talent" as their own to put to use. She almost always outran them and escaped- she knew forests better than anyone and was good at hiding amidst the roots of great oaks.

There was no freedom in her world.

One man had held her for a long time- she lost track of the days that slipped into months and he only came out of her room when he needed her eyes. He was awful and unkind- she escaped when he carelessly left a door unlocked and was drunk enough to sedate a horse, and she ran until her feet bled against her shoes and ran some more.

Humans were greedy, but she wanted to protect them.

She wanted to die. Was she a demon? Beast? Monster? Girl? She didn't care. She wanted to die.

When she was 12, she found out that something sharp against the soft flesh of her arms felt free.

 _Die die die die_.

She came across a town where a young man had hung himself in a tree by the church and people were screaming. The loop of the noose was easy to replicate.

People in the next town were having a grand festival; she watched from afar in a tree and dropped the rope in her lap. She'd put it around her neck when the fun and fireworks were over, but she found more excuses to throw away the rope every time she tied it. She hated herself more for it.

At last, in her seventh year of wandering, the name Fairy Tail crossed her ears in a town on the coast and caught her interest. What kind of people were at a place named after her beloved friends who were still so fond of leaving sparkling stones and glass? They had to be elegant, refined, delicate people.

They weren't.

Her first encounter with Fairy Tail came in the form of two boys in the midst of fighting who shoved her over as soon as she reached the guild doors. The people inside were drinking and howling and causing a ruckus. She almost felt insulted.

The master she'd observed from a distance before speaking to was shriveled and gray, but spoke kindly, didn't question why she looked at no one, didn't stare at her ratted hair in her face, and seemed to take pity on her thin and bony figure and paid for a meal and a room at a dormitory and pointed her in the direction of the request board where she could work.

The people there were unrefined and loud, yes, but had a warm presence. She liked them. From afar, that was.

She was quiet. She would enter the guild, grab the easiest job on the board, and hurry out and ignore the people calling out to her to come play a game or eat a meal. They were friendly. Good. Kind. She had to protect them from her.

She still tied rope. She still kept a blade at her bedside. She still tried to find excuses to put the rope around her throat and always found excuses not to. She was still Medusa at the beginning and end of every day.

Death. Death. Death would be warm and sweet. No more pain, no more hate. Maybe she would jump from somewhere high up. She had no public records. No one would identify her body. They'd move on without blinking.

 _Death_.

Evergreen was lonely. She wanted to die because she was lonely, and she was lonely because she wanted to die. What a miserable, pathetic circle. She couldn't leave it. She'd never feel love again. That's what she thought. The world was gray and nothing sparkled. It wouldn't ever be colorful again.

And yet, the world began to glow in incandescence the second she saw him.


	4. general

_**A/N:**_ im. crying because im in love with laxus dreyar. And I'm also crying because i was able to use my own experiences to write this chapter, because, like Laxus as a kid, I have a lot of medical issues and things wrong with me, so I was able to use my own experiences to write this chapter and it made me sad.

i love that boy

* * *

Laxus had never met his mother, though people were always abuzz about her when he was around. She was a gorgeous girl with warm brown skin and pale blonde hair, orange eyes that could electrify you. Nobody talked about her personality, what she was like- just about her apparently dazzling good looks, and nobody really talked about how she went out of the world. Apparently Laxus was much too young for those things.

Except to his grandfather, who would speak of his daughter-in-law's good qualities constantly.

His mother was a magnificent mage, even better than her husband, or most anyone in the guild, actually. The wind met her every command and she handled it with grace and elegance, but apparently she was clumsy outside of a battle. She was kind and high-spirited. She drew people to her with her sugary sweet presence. She liked birds better than dogs or cats. She had a special talent for puzzles, but was bad at even the simplest of cooking. And she had died in childbirth, leaving behind a hollow man, a shell of whom he had once been, a newborn son, and an entire building of grief-torn people.

His grandfather apologized after he said anything about his daughter-in-law. Laxus learned from older members of the guild that Makarov had been in the same situation when he was born, left without a mother shortly after. He felt particularly closer to his grandfather after that, perhaps even a bit glad that there was at least one person who could understand his situation.

His father, on the other hand, never said a word about his deceased wife. Not a word. He liked to be quiet, and sometimes Laxus could appreciate that. He liked the quiet as well. But it was unnerving when he asked where the pictures of his mother were and he only got an annoyed grunt and a smack on the head, asked if they could go out, tried to talk about his day.

Maybe Ivan wasn't even his father. He sure didn't act like one. Most days he would simply drop him off at the guildhall, give him a halfhearted warning to behave, and leave, maybe even for days on end. People around him whispered about this and that, and by the time Laxus was six, he knew just what his father went around doing.

He was looking for a way to bring his wife back to life.

His grandfather mumbled about it constantly and never spoke to his own son kindly, always scolding him and muttering about taboo. How bringing the dead back was impossible, and even if it wasn't, it was blasphemous. The dead had to stay dead. They had lived as long as they were meant to. They even fought, just one time. With screaming and shouting and scraps of cutting paper flying throughout the guild, slicing across tables and the flesh of a few unfortunate people who got in the way.

Ivan went away for entire months after that.

People became increasingly worried during those months as Laxus' health deteriorated further and further. He had always been sickly, but he seemed to be catching a cold every two weeks, running out of breath after walking for just a short while, and they cursed Ivan for leaving his too-young son in such a condition. Macao and Wakaba constantly pointed their fingers back towards his guest room in the guildhall, tapping their feet and warning _No no, young man. It's raining outside. Back to bed_.

He felt awful. His body itched, it ached, he always felt like he was going to explode or throw up or implode. He sweat much too frequently to the point where he had to bathe at least twice a day to get the stench off and rest his body in boiling hot water. His grandfather checked on him constantly, sat in the room and read him stories in silly voices, and the guild members would come back from jobs with sparkling souvenirs in their hands and adventure on their lips for him. The company made him feel happy, much less sick.

There was a night, shortly after he turned nine, where he didn't feel quite so ill. His grandfather was not at his side, did not come when he weakly called for him, so he got out of bed with the intention to simply get a cold compress and snuggle back underneath the boundless blankets.

He walked out into the main hall, but quickly edged back towards the doorway when he saw his grandfather furiously speaking to a communications lacrima. The image in it was blurry- the technology wasn't that great. Laxus didn't find himself nearly as impressed with it as most of the adults were.

Makarov turned from fury to begging in a second, leaning towards the lacrima with a tight voice. His shoulders were hunched forward. He looked like a frail old man, and Laxus felt a tight knot start in his stomach. His grandfather was old. Fragile. He had never quite realized that before and it frightened him. What if, sooner rather than later, Grandpa left him, just as his father did? What would he do then? He would have no father, no mother, and no grandfather. Just the guild. Just himself.

Makarov was pleading, begging whoever it was on the other side to come home. He carried on, his voice warbling as he spoke. A few times it cracked, a few times he had to stop, but he kept going, begging and pleading with who Laxus eventually made out to be his father and who said nothing.

He didn't even flinch when he told him that Laxus was dying.

When people visited him from then on, it made sense. Why they were so kind. Why they had cakes and treats and fun baubles. The master's grandson, barely nine, was already inching towards death and there was nothing they could do about it. He found his medical file under his bed, carefully hidden by Porlyusica, and pored over it all night.

He was dying. His muscles were failing. His bones were practically paper. His lungs could barely hold air. His organs were all wrong. None of the medications were working. He had never been expected to have a long lifespan. His mother had gone into labor three months far too early, and that was why she had died and that was why he was going to die.

But Laxus was finally going to get to see those striking orange eyes.

Porlyusica began to come every day. She did not know that he knew he was dying. She gave him with the same contempt and gentle treatment as she did every time she visited. His grandfather did not tell him that he was dying either. The knot in Laxus' stomach grew and tightened every time he looked at him and knew that he was going to go before his grandfather. It wasn't fair. But, if what he'd said back then was right, Laxus had lived just as long as he was meant to.

Conscious of his situation, Laxus grew more keen of his pain and just how excruciating it was. Just how hard it was to hold air in his lungs. Just how hard it was to eat, to walk, to heal after bruising from shots. Meanwhile, children from the city played outside on the lake's edge, happy and healthy as could be, completely unaware that a boy their same age was curled up on the porch of Death's Door.

A month later, he could not walk anymore without the use of crutches. Macao took him into town in a wheelchair, but it was too embarrassing; he refused to go the next time the opportunity was offered. He had a hard time thinking and had to be asked by Porlyusica at least three times how he felt before he could understand her and respond.

Sadly, he realized he was oddly at peace with his death. He was desperate to see his mother, after all. They could spend a lot of time together.

Another month after his legs severely weakened, the guild doors slammed open and in walked Ivan, with greasy hair that hadn't been cut in months, a crooked nose like it had been broken and messily healed multiple times, and a small orange stone the size of a child's fist gripped tightly in his hand. When he presented it to his son, Laxus could see light flickering inside of it, little bolts of lightning and clouds misting inside of the orange orb. His father snatched it back after letting the boy admire it for a second and dragged him from the bed, ignoring the boy's yelps and screams.

The next while was a blur. Laxus had a hard time focusing on anything anymore. If he looked really hard, he could see his grandfather yelling at his son, hear words like psychotic and evil, hear his father laugh. There was a train at some point, and though the time slipped by in his half-conscious state, he knew it was a very long train ride. His legs were numb and his father had to carry him to the next location, where a doctor inside lurked. When he loomed over Laxus, he looked like a monster in his surgical mask and with his waxy hands, and when Laxus woke next, there was an intense pain in his temple and he could not remember what had happened after the doctor had reached for him.

But he could walk.

He could hear people properly.

Laxus did not know anyone could breathe so deeply.

There was an odd lightning strike scar across his right eye, but he could see just fine, so he did not pay it much mind. The guild members were elated to see him up and walking and talking when he came home, and his grandfather's eyes were misty. Whatever Ivan had done to him, it had worked and Laxus definitely was not going to die. He had never felt better. Stronger. Perhaps Ivan did love him after all.

Only shortly after their return, Makarov took him away from his father. The guest room became his permanent room. They moved all his things there. Ivan did not seem to care about the absence of his son from the house and instead almost seemed to relish his freedom. He took more jobs, read more books, and spent a lot more time feeding the mangy crows that always seemed to be so attracted to him.

Nah. Ivan didn't love him. Though Laxus was grateful for his newfound strength, he knew he could never love his father back, no, not after the cold shoulder all his life, after the year-long abandonment, after he had had a magical dragon stone surgically placed inside his son's skull for the sake of money.

His grandfather hadn't held any of it back, despite his young age. He explained it all. That Ivan didn't love him. That he had gone out looking for a way to bring back his wife but had been swallowed by greed in that time. That the stone was a Dragon Lacrima and that he'd had it placed in his son's body not for his health, but for the future profit. That Ivan did not care about his family, Fairy Tail, or anything anymore.

He cared about resurrection and money.

The years passed- his father became more engrossed in his alone time. Laxus developed his lightning magic, and Makarov boasted that it must be hereditary, that it must have come from his own father. To anyone who would listen, he would brag that Laxus would surpass everyone, because he was such a talented boy with such a kind heart and good spirit, and those things triumphed over everything else.

Some shadow loomed over Laxus, though. Tall, dark, heavy. People whispered, of course they did, whenever he came around, but it was not because of his "kind heart," not at all about his "good spirit." It was about his family. He was the grandson of the prestigious Makarov Dreyar. Of course he would be great. He was the grandson of Makarov Dreyar. Not because of his skill, not because of his dedication, but because of his heritage.

His heritage tasted like a mouthful of bitter herbs.

After a while, he found people who looked at him, not at the Dreyar name. A boy with glaring eyes and a hard heart. A weirdo kid with a tattoo across his face and a fake grin oozing mischief. The skinniest girl he'd ever seen in oversized clothes and cuts up and down her arms.

What a bunch of weirdos to make a family with.


	5. depraved

_**A/N**_ : damn chesh back at it again with the suffering kids (btw i'd strongly urge listening to the cover song the lyrics are from tbqh)

" _Human child, depraved and vile_

 _In your smile the terror of a killer_."

-Adriana Figueroa, _Megalovania_

* * *

 **x778**

People whispered about Freed whenever he walked in. What an indecent bunch, really, pointing like that and acting like he wasn't good-of-hearing enough to be able to catch what they couldn't help but say. They stared at his bruises, his messy hair, the bandages sloppily wrapped around his neck, and his sword. What use did a mage have for a sword, they whispered.

The answer was perfectly simple: It was good for stabbing people. It was a wonderful use.

"Freed, why don't you visit Porlyusica? She lives in the-"

He walked straight past the tall woman trying to talk to him. His eyes were glued to the job board and he barged straight towards it, tugging his patched jacket over his shoulder where it slipped down his wounded arm. That last encounter had been a doozy- the woman had had a sword of her own, but she used it clumsily. She wasn't fast. She had but brute force, but that wasn't enough to conquer Freed Justine.

His wound was for nothing, anyway. Not one of them had a clue about what he wanted. They'd begged him to leave, asked him desperately to go away and not hold his sword so close to their throats, but they had begged in vain. The useless and depraved were to be exterminated. He supposed he'd rid the country of yet another band of useless members of society, but who cared, really?

Multiple pairs of eyes bore into his back as he shouldered people aside and put his hand on the board, running his fingers over the edges of dry and crumpled papers, worn from their travel to the guild. Some called for moronic things, such as giving magic lessons, others for things like exterminating mischief makers, and a few even asked for escorts and bodyguards on perilous journeys. But those were not the things he was looking for. He ripped a few away and let them flutter to the floor and noted the groans of irritation from people behind him with anger. The shoulder of his coat slid down again.

He wanted dark guilds. He wanted criminals. Fugitives. The dirty and grimy jobs teeming with lowlifes and scum. On the second floor, surely, he would find more, but it was constantly guarded by an S-Class mage who laughed whenever he asked to go up. His best resource for finding his murderer, right above his head, and he couldn't even use it. Annoying, annoying. Maybe he could hide until the guild closed and then go up and find what he wanted, if it was there. Maybe he would try that in a couple weeks if he didn't find anything on the normal board. Sneaking upstairs had the potential to be worth a thrashing by the master and expulsion from the guild.

"Y'know, for a kid who takes so many jobs, you think you would have more money for proper clothes."

A person tugged at the shoulder of his coat and yanked it back up where it belonged. Freed flinched and swung around, smacking at their wrist and scowling. He knocked back into the request board, tripped over its legs, and went sprawling on the ground with the hilt of his sword digging uncomfortably into his side. A few snickers went here and there around the hall, but they quickly stopped for fear of their lives.

"Easy there, kid. Was just tryin' to help. Here, stand up."

A hand shoved into his face without a bit of eloquence. So close, in fact, that Freed could see tiny scars like leaf-veins winding all over the flesh, a soft pink as though they were on the fresher side. His eyes travelled up the hand, up the arm, and landed on the person's face, and his stomach lunged for some reason he did not know- it was something like a pull.

The boy couldn't have been that much older than him. He wore a sloppy yellow shirt that had the appearance of having not been cleaned nor ironed in a while, scuffed combat boots, and large black headphones hung around his neck. Music came from them, loud enough to hear, and Freed wondered about the condition of the boy's eardrums. He had a square, set jaw, a mouth curved in confusion, piercing orange eyes, and scruffy blond hair that hung in front of his face. The thing most striking about him, however, was the sharp scar shaped like a bolt of lightning that raced over the right side of his face, pulling the skin tight and making the eye bigger than the left one.

The feeling in his gut went away and he slapped his hand out of his face, standing on his own and making it a point of drawing himself up to his tallest height. The boy came back up and revealed that, despite Freed almost popping his spine out of place, he was still taller by half-a-head.

"Just tryin' to help." His voice was lazy and huffy, as though he did not have the energy to speak properly.

"So you've said," Freed snapped. "You distracted me."

He turned back to the board and leafed through the papers again, but the boy hovered over his shoulder. He hadn't paused his music yet and it still blared faintly through his headphones. The sound was vague, but he heard a hard guitar riff and the pounding of drums. It invaded his mind, throbbing against his brain, but he tried to shut it out. He tored another paper off the board and let it flutter to the ground with the others. The music still went. The boy still hovered. He tore off another paper.

"Someone's gonna have to clean that up."

His chest was tight with irritation. "That isn't my problem."

"You're a nasty one, aren't you?"

Nasty. Freed had never been described as "nasty." He ignored it and huffed.

"How long've you been here in the guild now? Half-a-year? Whole one?"

"I haven't been keeping track," he grumbled.

"I'll check the records." The boy regarded him curiously, a animal-like tilt to his head as he observed him out of the corner of his eye. "What's your name?"

"I don't hand it out to trash."

He let out a low whistle, almost as though he were impressed at the barb, and pulled a lacrima from his pocket and fiddled with it. The music around his neck halted. "Rude, aren't you?"

Freed ripped a job off the board: _Locate an escaped criminal_. This was a job straight up his alley. Unfortunately, his path out of the godforsaken building was blocked by the blond-haired boy. When he stepped to the right, so did he. When he stepped to the left, so did the boy. He mirrored all his movements perfectly and Freed was absolutely seething. His teeth clenched so hard that they were in danger of shattering.

The boy tilted his head again. "You don't know who I am. You really don't."

"Am I supposed to?" Dear Lord, he was one second, just _one_ away from pushing this boy over and stomping on his throat.

"My grandfather is the guildmaster here."

Guildmaster? Certainly, he was a nice old man, but kindness did not matter, and being related to an old fart was nothing. So what? Was he trying to brag? Trying to catch Freed's eye and get some attention? Because it was certainly not working. Freed did not have an eye for status, not anymore. "Good for you."

The boy's smile was crooked and had just a dash of smugness. "Oh? That doesn't mean anything to you? You don't want to grovel at the feet of the grandson of one of the Ten Saints?"

Was this arrogance? Or was he teasing him? Freed didn't quite know, but in any case, he was royally pissed off. The doors to the guildhall were calling to him, the paper in his hand was full of hope, and he harshly shouldered past the boy, who started to laugh as though he were completely overjoyed.

"I'll be seeing you again soon, Freed Justine!"

The bastard already knew his name.

* * *

Laxus would not leave him alone, and Freed was about ready to throw him out a window. He seemed enthralled by the fact that Freed did not treat him with reverence or lick his shoes, maybe even _giddy_ at the prospect. He followed him around the guildhall with a massive, smug grin, carefully watched him whenever he left, and was always leaning against the same damn pillar when he came back like he owned it, waiting with a lazy wave in store.

Laxus Dreyar needed to get stabbed. He needed to get stabbed very hard. Maybe even repeatedly. He needed to leave Freed alone.

"Having some trouble?" he asked one day, his mouth full of an orange slice. A fleck of the chewed flesh hit the back of Freed's head and he hissed, burying his hands against his head. There were already peels on his papers, and though they were delightfully fragrant, they were not appreciated nor distracting.

He had no lead on Carver Manning. No matter who he threatened or intimidated or killed, no one had a lick of information. Useless. They were all useless. Dark guilds, fugitives, thieves, every scum of society, and none of them had even the vaguest idea who he was talking about or where he was.

But Freed would find Carver. And he'd slaughter him. It was all just in due time.

"Leave," was Freed's response.

"I can do what I want."

"I'll stab you."

"Try."

Electricity sparked between the two, but it probably wasn't Laxus' magic. It was probably just hate.

"What are you so focused on anyway?" Laxus asked, leaning back against his pillar. "That

intense look on your face is gross."

It was a tiny and pathetic response, but: "You're gross."

"Oh, I'm wounded."

The two went quiet and the background noises of the howling guild came rushing back in. People laughing, wooden mugs of beer smashing together, the occasional burst of a fight or the high pitch of breaking glass. It was too much, too annoying, and Freed slammed his papers into his bag, ignoring the crinkles in them, and made for the door. The creaking of the pillar behind him indicated that Laxus had stopped leaning and was pursuing him.

The sky that day was a bright blue. The sunshine illuminated the inside of the guild as he threw open the doors, and a few people, already hopelessly drunk in the middle of the day, groaned and swatted at the air. The air was so thick and fresh; Freed hoped it would swallow him up, that he would disappear to somewhere where Laxus Dreyar could not follow him, but, as usual, he had no such luck.

The following persisted for a good ten minutes. Freed turned a corner, Laxus followed. He walked faster, Laxus did so as well. Even when Freed stopped and turned to glare at him, he only got a lazy look back and a tiny wave, and it pissed him the hell off. Who did this guy think he was? What a self-important, mangy, vile little-

"I know where you're going."

 _Nosy._

"Oh, do you now?"

"You shouldn't go."

"Why do you care?"

"I just want to keep an eye on you. You seem like the kind of kid to do something reckless."

Freed gripped the strap of his bag tighter. The papers inside, filled with the names of dark guild members, murderers, locations, felt heavier than it had a second ago. Something deep in his chest tightened for a brief moment, but he grit his teeth and stared at the cobblestone on the ground. Keep an eye on him? That sounded caring. It was a lie. This kid was only out to annoy Freed, torment him.

"Screw off," he mumbled.

Laxus's feet shifted in Freed's line of vision. He was taken aback, just slightly, it appeared. "I know you're going to that dark guild's base. What are you looking for? Let me help."

"I said screw off!"

People walking past them looked anxiously at one another. They walked faster and parted around the two, eager to avoid them. They were making a big scene, and Freed's cheeks burned ferociously, but Laxus did not move or seem at all phased. He was at ease.

"You're trying to find someone," he pressed. "And probably someone who's no good based on where you're looking."

"Leave me alone," Freed hissed. "I hate you."

"Whoever you're looking for, they aren't worth the danger, or the humanity you've thrown away."

"Go away."

"You're being a stupid kid. I don't know what happened, but forget it and move on."

Freed turned on his heel and began to make for the train station. He didn't have that much money left from what Adilah'd left behind, but he had enough for one more round-trip. Literally, all his money was riding on this job. If he could just find Carver, just slit his throat, he could carry on normally and go back to an everyday life. He'd stop killing. He'd stop having headaches and having to take showers three times a day to feel clean.

"Kid!"

A passerby, a plump older man beside them yelped at the sound of a sword being drawn and stared very warily at the tip of it at Laxus' throat. He fled carefully, warning other people away with a hushed voice, and soon nobody passed them anymore. The older boy looked down cautiously at the tip of the rapier. When he breathed, it bit into his skin, and Freed took a sort of twisted satisfaction at the little red beads emerging from his skin.

He looked for something to say. Some long, noble spiel about his lust for revenge, how he could not forgive the man who'd taken away everything, that he just wanted his parents, all three of them back, and he wasn't going to be stopped by a brute like Laxus Dreyar, but everything caught in his throat and all he could say was: "Shut up."

* * *

"Carver Manning?" one man echoed, scratching the side of his head. "Never heard of 'im 'round here."

The guild hall was a shabby place- a dingy old house with paint peeling off the walls and creaky wood floors. The chandelier above them, however, was sparkling and cast a beautiful array of lights against the walls and gave it a feeling of beauty and class at first glance, though it did a poor job of disguising anything when you looked hard beyond it. People sat at the tables, a massive group bigger than any other he'd dealt with before, swords and axes at their sides, looking at him with hunger. They looked famished and Freed didn't doubt that they would eat him. They looked savage enough for it.

"Think harder," Freed insisted, waving the drawing of the man closer to the guild master. "You're both the scum. I expect you to have at least some sort of connection."

A woman in the corner laughed- she was drunk.

"That's not a nice thing to say," the guild master warned. He stood and Freed took a step back, reaching his hand to his back for the sword that was strapped there. He was big- taller than six feet, with sickly gray skin and watery red eyes. He had all the appearance of a very ill man, hungry and weary, but he didn't at all look pitiful. He looked like a starved wolf.

The other people stood on queue, as though they'd been waiting for their master to take action. The chandelier's light glinted in their eyes, making them unnaturally bright, and it became very apparent to Freed that these oafs were exponentially easy to provoke and that he had done just that. They closed around him, silent as a breeze, and a chill racked Freed's spine. Other dark guilds that he'd taken care of recently had every bit of tact of a hyena, all laughs and grins and arrogance, but they regarded him with stony faces and sharp eyes, somber as death.

"You're a little kid, so I'll give you a warning," the master said. He rubbed at the five o'clock shadow on his jaw. "Leave. Go back to the hole you crawled out of."

Freed kept his hand steady as he yanked the sword from its sheath. A lone cough echoed throughout the room and the master sighed and shrugged. The air around his hand warped- a massive war ax appeared, double-bladed and worn down. Getting his head chopped off by that thing was bound to be a long and messy experience.

"A Requip Mage?" he asked. "Boring."

"Oh?" The head of the ax smashed into the floor between Freed's feet, sending chips of soft, rotting wood and dust flying around the room. A few of the guild members coughed, but most of them remained as still as stone. "And what exactly do you do, little boy?"

Magic. Freed hadn't used magic in a very long time. There hadn't been any need for it, when all he needed was a blade. He turned the hilt of the rapier in his hand, feeling the chill of the metal, and a mage stumbled forward just a bit, obviously inebriated and off balance. They shrieked and collapsed back as he lashed out- their arm rolled to the ground, hitting the toe of a guildmate who stumbled back in alarm.

"I cut."

The master sniffed. "Kill him."

A man the size of a tank lunged forward in the blink of an eye. When his hands slammed against Freed's stomach, a shock ripped through his body. The window, already scrappy anyway, shattered as he flew through it and landed on the hard ground outside. The door to the mangy house flew open and the members charged him, their bodies alight with magic and weapons lifted high up into the air.

Panic did not touch him, however- Freed was made invincible through rage. He would not die until the day he had Carver Manning's head on a silver platter.

The sun was just starting to set on the horizon, growing redder, it seemed, with each slice Freed made. A finger flew into the air, followed by an ear, and then he skewered a young lady clean through her chest. He held her twitching body flush against himself and glowered at the dark mages, who looked prepared to fight, but hesitant to make a move while their dead comrade was being used as a shield.

He would divide them. He would make them doubt. He'd tear them apart.

His stomach hurt.

"Little bastard!"

The cold presence of an ax was right above him and he was noticing too late. Sparks of hope glimmered in the eyes of the other guild members, but, with a heavy grunt, he gripped the limp girl and swung her around, letting her take the brunt of the blow. Blood splattered against his face and jacket, the man with the weapon yelled in alarm, and Freed let the girl go and fled back into the thick of the mages, a wicked and sick feeling growing stronger in his gut. There were so many. They were upon him like demons, and there was a lot of blood on his shirt, but it wasn't his.

A heavy blow nearly shattered his shoulder; he suspected the same mage who'd thrown him out the window with a shockwave, but it didn't even matter. A neat little slice along his throat and in the blink of an eye he was gone, gasping and drowning in his own blood. His rapier broke against the mass of a shield, but its owner had quite a nice blade of their own. They yelled as he gripped their arm and hurled them over his shoulder, right into the way of an oncoming fire spell, and took the blade while they screamed in agony.

They kept coming. Just like cockroaches. There were so many, and there was so much blood. They piled up more and more, swinging and casting with wild eyes that grew heavier and more desperate with each swing of his steel. The sounds of people screaming horribly, wailing and crying, were louder than ever in the further corners of his mind. There were people on the ground, cradling each other in their arms and howling, and something squirmed deep down in Freed's stomach.

" _Every life matters, kid. Even raising my sword against an obviously guilty person hurts. Knights have a duty to protect everyone."_

Why was Freed killing them again? Carver. They didn't know anything about Carver, and they had threatened him and they were bad. That was reason enough.

His heart was beating too hard. It was going to come out of his chest, and to relieve the tension, he sliced across someone else's. He'd never killed such a concentration of people. The blood was making him nauseous. A club slammed against his back and he fell to the ground, gasping, a heavy rage building in his stomach. He swung out and gouged his sword against a man, already so wounded and bleeding, and he fell to the ground atop a woman with pitch black hair.

Freed panted and coughed. His back hurt and was beginning to bruise. A sharp wind spell had cut into his arm that was already wounded and he was bleeding heavily. His coat had been lost to the fight, probably resting with some corpse, and his scabbard had been abandoned after he'd broken it smashing it over someone's head. His legs felt wobbly and weak and had been burned with a fire spell, and he was acutely aware of the blood dripping off the end of the sword he'd stolen.

Carver had killed Adilah. This was just a stepping stone to get to Carver. These people were dark mages. They really deserved to die.

Another drop of blood dripped off his sword. A young woman reached for another, tears leaking down her face as she mouthed words. The sun was low on the horizon. Half the sky had turned an inky blue and the stars were starting to come out. Some people, half-dead and barely hanging on, heaved and gasped for each breath as they stared at their last sunset. They had looked so frightening only ten minutes before as they'd piled upon him like wolves, but now they looked so ordinary and desperate.

Maybe Adilah had looked this way when she had lay dying. Struggling to see the stars.

Something caught in Freed's throat.

"What are you?!"

A meaty hand curled around his neck, swinging him high up off the ground. He choked and gasped, kicking his legs and gripping at the broad fingers of the guild master who held him up. A deep gash raced across his face, crossing over his eye, which was obviously missing. Tears cut a path down his cheeks, muddling the blood and dirt there, and he would not stop weeping as he strangled Freed harder.

"P-pu...t…" He gasped, squeezing the hand desperately and struggling to breath. His jaw had begun to hurt and his eyes were burning.

"You depraved child! Wicked thing!" he bellowed, shaking the boy. "This was my family! I'll never see them again!"

Adilah. Freed was never going to see Adilah again. He was never going to see the squad again. Carver had taken them away, and now Freed had done just the same. The man's eyes watered and wavered, and he saw himself in them. The eyes of a boy who'd lost everything. The eyes of a man who'd lost everything, both of them in just a matter of minutes.

"I'll kill you," the man muttered, squeezing his throat until the boy screamed and felt it would snap. "You horrible boy."

Freed had become Carver.

He let his fingers slip away from the man's hand and hang limp at his side. He was going to see Adilah again. He just wanted one last look at the stars.

A crack like a gunshot sounded. His ears popped uncomfortably, almost painfully, and the same must have happened for the master. He released him and yelped, shoving his hands over his ears. Freed hit the ground hard, gasping in air and writhing, and a hand landed on his shoulder to pull him upwards.

"Freed! Kid! Breathe, okay?" Laxus was shouting, shaking him harshly.

Laxus.

Laxus?

Freed struggled to talk against the flood of saliva in his mouth and the fuzziness in his head, but Laxus abandoned him before he could even say anything. Every step the young man took pounded in his sore ears. The clash between the master and him was like that of a lightning strike, and he struggled to stand up. He'd landed in a mess of blood and his hair was sticking to his head, was messed around his face, but he could still see the red specks that flew from Laxus' lips as the master planted a fist in his gut.

Freed took a step. He fell. Laxus landed a punch on the wounded side of the master's face and the man howled, but swung his arm and sent him skidding. Laxus wasn't about to use magic against such a weak opponent, and that was obvious. But the master outmatched him in physical strength. He was going to get the living hell beaten out of him.

It hurt to extend his arm, but Freed pressed his finger against the ground and began to trace with blood.

"Stop protecting that monster! He killed my entire guild!"

"He's just a kid!"

"Monster!"

It had been so long… so long since he'd cast a spell, but he had to do something.

Laxus shouted and keeled over- it sounded more like surprise than pain, but it startled Freed anyway. His lines became shaky and wobbled, yet he finished the last stroke anyway. The guild master stumbled forward and grabbed a lance from the ground and took aim, but a buzzing sound echoed through the clearing and a wall shot up between him and Laxus. The head of the lance shattered against the runes, ricocheting back to scratch the arms of the man, and the wall lunged towards him and wrapped around his wrists.

Test number 5 on the shorthand rune exam: Creating effective handcuffs with runes. It had been his lowest score on the test, but maybe the adrenaline now was doing something for his performance.

There was his borrowed sword nearby. He took the handle and used it like a cane, standing up shakily and still feeling woozy from his lack of breath. The master wasn't struggling at all, and instead was curled up on himself, his head pressed against his imprisoned wrists. He was bleeding, quickly and heavily, and Freed doubted he was going to last much longer.

The carnage was starting to reek.

"Freed." A hand landed on his shoulder and he looked over at Laxus, who looked equally disgusted at the smell. "What happened?"

The scent was so thick in his nose. His eyes began to water.

"I'm going to be sick."


	6. starting line

a/n: uhhh,,,, UHHHHH,,,, sorry it's been like a year but i promise i still love my children and want to keep writing this... sorry... guess i got into university and 2016 was really busy for me and stuff, and i kinda moved onto other fandoms, but again i still love my children! good to be back i think

also, i was thinking about maybe making this a main story, but creating a collection of side stories? just so i have more freedom in writing and also so the main story doesn't get super long lol. if you have any opinions on that, please let me know!

* * *

Porlyusica was a relentless and extremely angry caretaker. She wrapped bandages very tightly, grumbled and sighed as she did it, and brandished a broom whenever Freed tried to get up from the bed. The bash of the straw against his head was the absolute least he deserved, and he took the thrashing humbly and without complaint.

"Stupid boy, dragging me out here for this." She shoved a mash of something that tasted horrible into his mouth- it was oatmeal with medicinal herbs, he concluded when he saw the contents of the bowl, and she dropped it into his lap. "You're fine, just fine! Just a few cuts and bruises."

It was making him feel terribly sick, but he let her shove a few more spoonfuls of the porridge into his mouth and laid back down when she shoved him. She fluffed his pillows with a scowl, angrily scribbled on her clipboard, and stalked around the room with a fury in her heart. She hissed whenever anyone came into the room, and Laxus was no exception.

"How am I to care for anyone in this dump if no one will leave me alone?" she demanded.

Laxus shrugged.

"And what do you want?" she pressed.

He shrugged again.

Freed watched warily as he crossed the room and plopped down in a chair next to his bed. Porlyusica sighed, scratched one more thing on her papers, and left, slamming the door behind her.

Silence settled over them. Freed looked down at his lap and fiddled with the bowl and the spoon, staring at the remaining dregs of the medicinal gunk. It was leaving his mouth numb, and he wondered if it was supposed to. Laxus tapped his fingers along the nightstand next to them, and the hollow sound grated on Freed's nerves.

"How are you doing?" he eventually asked.

Freed gripped the bowl. "Well."

"The old lady is kinda mean, but she's the best doctor around. You'll be back to normal eventually."

Normal. Back to normal. That sounded very odd. What was Freed's "normal?" Was it the kid before the fire? The boy from Crocus? Or the murderer, the grim reaper who now made him sick to his stomach?

"I told you not to go," Laxus continued. He wrenched the bowl from Freed's stoney grasp and set it aside before leaning forward. His eyes were lightning. "You should have accepted my help when I offered it."

"And yet, I did, and I did not."

"Don't be smart," he warned.

Freed took in a deep breath. Swallowed his pride. "My apologies." He hesitated for a second, then asked, "Why did you come for me?"

"Why? You're just a kid, and I knew you were going to get yourself in a heap of trouble. Whatever I was expecting, though, it wasn't half as bad as what I found." He stayed silent for a while before he spoke again. "I didn't know you were a rune mage."

"I haven't used that magic in a long time."

"Usually those sorts don't join guilds." Laxus leaned back in his chair. "They enlist in the Rune Knighthood, where they get specialized training. Usually become bigwigs in the military."

He remembered the glistening swords. The exam hall, the training grounds, the hallway he'd walked through, and the stairs he'd sat on. The bright white coats with the black lining and their emblems bold on the back. He remembered the perfectly preserved uniform, hung pristinely back in his hovel, with the clean rip and pink stains. He buried his fingers into the sheets and grit his teeth.

"What's eating you?"

"My mother," Freed began slowly. He hadn't had a proper conversation in a long time, and it felt like speaking a very foreign language. "My adopted mother. My biological parents died in a fire when I was just a kid. My adopted mother was a Rune Knight. They called her a prodigy."

Laxus found a trinket, a stress ball, on the counter and began to roll it in his hands. "So what? You didn't want to follow in her footsteps?"

"I was going to," he explained. "I wanted to. I passed the exams. All of them, with flying colors. They started to call _me_ the prodigy, and they already had a military position prepared for when I entered." Laxus passed him the ball and he began to squeeze at the foam, pinching it between his fingers. "Th- there was a man on her squad, and he was a traitor for some dark guild. He slaughtered the rest of their squad and her a couple years ago." He clutched the ball until his knuckles turned completely white and clenched his jaw. A lump formed in his throat.

"So you didn't join the knighthood because there was a traitor in the midst?"

"I don't trust the system anymore," Freed confirmed. "And what I needed- what I _wanted_ \- was to find the man who killed them." He leaned towards the counter and set the stress ball back down. Laxus stopped it from rolling off the edge.

"That's why you were always leaving, always doing the dirty jobs. For your mom."

Freed lowered his head and stared straight at his lap. The corners of his eyes burned. "Not anymore. When I was fighting that guild, I remembered: My mother loved everyone. Even people she had to arrest. She loved human life more than anything else. And for the past two years, I've been doing nothing but taking it, and it was all in her name." He was going to be sick. That's what it felt like. "I kept killing. I didn't stop."

"Kid-"

"I became the very man I hate."

The prospect and realization utterly crushed him. Freed hadn't had a single second thought of slaughtering anyone who wasn't useful, and that mindset wasn't likely so far off from Carver's: Kill what is in the way. Walk past it. Do it again.

Laxus rubbed his arm across his face, sniffed, and stood up, grunting like some old man. "And? What's next?"

Sick. Sick. He was going to vomit. He rubbed the back of his neck. It wasn't as sweaty as he thought it was going to be. "I don't… know. At all. I didn't even have a plan for what would happen after I- I finally-" He cleared his throat. "I don't have a path besides revenge. There hasn't been anything else."

A heavy hand came down on his back, giving him a solid whack. Freed coughed and winced, grabbing at his bandaged chest and feeling for a suddenly reopened wound. They hadn't, and the blow had helpfully knocked the sick feeling straight out of him.

"That's okay. It's okay if you don't have a path." Laxus patted his back a few more times and looked away. "A lot of people here don't have one. That's the kind of place this guild is."

His back was warm. Burning pleasantly, like he'd just had something hot to drink. He looked up at Laxus. "What kind of place?"

"The start. This place is where you get to start. It's right in front of you, Freed."

And it was.

* * *

Freed ate full meals for the first time in months. He took a shower every day. He cut his hair cleanly. He bought new clothes, moved to a proper apartment near the guildhall, and washed and ironed Adilah's uniform. He framed his credentials and put them on a counter in his kitchen. He ripped through his books and boards and newspaper clippings, and he threw away every bit of information he had ever gathered on Carver Manning.

It felt wrong, but also right.

"Lookin' slick, Freed Justine," Laxus commented on his first day back to the guild. He'd walked in without a sword strapped to him, with his hair cut cleanly near his ears, in nice pants and a clean blazer. He probably looked like an actual real, decent person, and it was already doing marvels for his reputation. Five people approached him for a friendly conversation and to offer a drink within his first hour of being there.

"Didn't know you had eyes under that mess of… whatever you called it," Laxus commented a few days later. He flipped lazily through a magazine, while Freed sat opposite of him, reading a book on eastern swordplay. He hadn't read for pleasure in months.

"Yes, I do have eyes," Freed acknowledged. "Had you not noticed the past days?"

"Didn't think to say anything 'til now," he admitted. "You've got a nice face. Keep cleanin' up like this, with the fancy coats and nice shoes, and you're gonna have to start beating away suitors with a stick."

Freed coughed against his fist, fighting a smirk. "Did you really just say 'suitors?'"

"Yeah."

"You sound like someone your grandfather's age, talking like that."

A hand slipped up out of nowhere, startling Freed, and slapped down on the table in front of him. The master glared up at them with a tight and distressed face. "I'm not that old!"

"You're, like, a thousand years old," Laxus responded with a grimace. He leaned down in his seat to glare at his grandfather. "Old as balls."

Makarov pinched his nose and scowled. "I didn't raise you to use that horrible language, young man."

"You say gross junk all the time!" Laxus protested in a nasally voice.

Makarov released his nose and Laxus fell back into his seat, rubbing at it. Freed picked up his book and stared deeply into it. Maybe he should even leave. They were obviously going to have some sort of grandfather-son conversation, and he didn't want to intrude. When he reached for his bag, however, the old man slapped his hand in warning.

"No, no," he scolded. "Please stay."

Laxus grumbled and turned his head, resting it in his palm to leave the other two to their own devices. Freed set down his book and ran his hand over the cover uncomfortably. There were a variety of things that a Wizard Saint would have to discuss with him: His wanton murder, his poor attitude towards other guild members, the fact that he'd held a sword to Laxus' throat, and the list carried on. And on. And on.

"Sir," Freed mumbled.

Makarov harrumphed and tugged at an end of his coarse mustache. "You've been with my boy lately, right?"

Freed's eyes flicked to Laxus momentarily. "He's been… keeping me out of trouble."

He scoffed. "Laxus? Keeping someone out of trouble? This is the most rebellious, ungrateful boy you'll ever meet in your life." He tugged at the edge of Laxus' shirt and he grumbled in response. Freed picked at a loose thread on his coat and stared in another direction. "And so, I have a bit of a favor to ask you."

The conversation wasn't taking the exact turn he'd been expecting. But, no one was sending him to jail, so it was nice, he supposed. "Sir?"

"He's in his stupid rebellious phase- one of which you seem to already be moving out of, based on your recent behaviors." Makarov studied him for a moment, as though appraising his own statement. "You, on the other hand, are intelligent and calm enough to pass difficult military exams. His head is thick and he's stupid. Watch after him, will you?"

Freed's eyes flicked over to Laxus and found him with a deep scowl on his face, but it appeared more lighthearted than upset. He looked back to Makarov and scrunched his eyebrows. "Watch after him?"

"Make sure he doesn't punch anyone important. Doesn't stay out late drinking. Keep him safe." The master exhaled through his nose and crossed his arms. "Do that for me, will you, Freed?"

Freed held his breath and pursed his lips together, wondering just what his answer should be. He knew what he wanted it to be: A resounding "yes." But Laxus' eyes bore into his back and Makarov was staring at him with the intensity of five suns, and he felt like throwing up the omelette he'd bought for breakfast.

"W- well, I-" A second passed where he only focused on keeping his food down, and then Laxus' hand fell on his shoulder. Freed jumped and twisted in his seat. The expression on Laxus' face was unreadable, and somehow comforting. He swallowed and looked back to Makarov. "I'll, uh, do my very best."

His omelette rested easy in his stomach.

Makarov smiled, and before he could respond, a shadow loomed over him.

"What's goin' on over here, Pops?" A drawling voice; it sounded like dirty oil, and Freed recoiled from the source: A tall, lanky man with ashen skin and greasy black hair. His clothes had the appearance of not being washed in days, and when he sat down next to Freed and slung an arm over his shoulder, they smelled like that too, along with whiskey and smoke.

Oh, there was the omelette again.

"Ivan. Back at last." The master's tone was chill and even, nothing of the mirth from before.

"Sure am, Pops." Ivan waved a lazy arm and twisted back to look at Laxus. If he had called the master "pops," then likely- "Son! What's this you got here?" He rustled Freed around, dug a fist into his side, and a boiling sensation started in his gut. He could snap his neck. Break his arm, or all his fingers. If he smashed the bottle of spirits across the table, he could jam the broken end into his throat.

Freed took a deep breath and shut his eyes, curling his fingers into a fist. No. No unnecessary violence. It was time to be good. Even if this man did smell like spoiled milk and was jostling him like a rag doll. Be. Good.

"Let him go, Father," Laxus mumbled.

Freed jumped and regarded the man holding him with renewed caution. Father? It was much too formal a term for Laxus, and Freed surmised that things were not sunshine-and-puppies between the three other men with him.

"Nah, I'm right serious, kiddo." Ivan's fingers jabbed into Freed's cheek. He grunted and slapped them away, resisting the urge to jerk them back til they broke. "Guy? Girl? I can't tell! What kinda plaything did ya pick up?"

Freed's cheeks flushed, red as the guild hall's banner.

"Ivan!" Makarov scolded. Laxus nearly threw himself over the table to wrench his father's arm away from Freed, a scowl on his face, and Freed stood and stepped behind the master. Humiliation. Disgust. He was beginning to understand just what kind of person this man was.

Ivan threw up an arm towards Freed, his eyes wide and trying for innocence. "What, I can't tell! Its got a strong jaw, but its eyes are sooo lovely."

Freed's arms shook. He could stab him, break his neck, punch his face in. The urge to inflict some pain was becoming unbearable, and he bounced on the balls of his feet and held one of his arms until his knuckles turned white.

"Leave him alone," Laxus warned. His own knuckles were white as he gripped his father's arm.

"He's a guy," Ivan exclaimed. "Well. Mystery solved. Now, what're you doin' with him, kiddo?"

"He's a friend," Laxus muttered. "Why don't you just go on another job?"

Freed jumped and tore his eyes off of the scene- the master rested his hand on his leg and glared at the other two, and his moustache twitched. "I'm sorry," he whispered.

He shook his head. "It's"- He struggled to choke out the next word- "fine. Are they always like this?"

"Ivan has never been an exemplary father," Makarov admitted. "It's my fault. Neither have I."

"You made a friend?" Ivan pressed. "A real, honest-to-gods buddy? Daddy's so proud of you!"

"Shut your mouth!"

"Don't you talk to your father that way." Ivan didn't flinch, but laughed as Laxus smashed a hand against the side of his face, pushing him farther away, and the older man's eyes met Freed's. A chill ran down his spine. His eyes were pitch black, bottomless, and cold. They were the exact opposite of Laxus' electrifying orange ones, or the warm color of the master's. "Now, who are you? His friend? Lemme tell you, kid, bein' this boy's friend is the worst decision you'll ever make."

Laxus glared at his father, then at Freed, and then at the table.

Ivan slapped his son's hand away. "He's bad news! Been a moron since the day he was born, and he's a rotten kid now. He'll be rotten until the day he dies."

The only thing that occurred to Freed was that he, too, was also rotten, and would also be rotten until the day he died. He looked over Ivan's shoulder at Laxus, who was slumped over the table and glaring at nothing, and recalled a saying he'd never paid much mind to before:

Birds of a feather flock together.

"The thing that seems like bad news here is you," Freed snapped back. "You've worn out your welcome. You should leave."

Ivan's entire being shifted. His brow fell low over his eyes, his nose scrunched in disgust. His lips coiled out into a sneer and his body slumped forward to look at the boy in front of him better. He took a long sniff, glaring. "Is that so?"

"Yes. I have better things to do than listen to you blather," he replied.

"Watch your tone with your elders," Ivan warned.

The master coughed into his hand, and he was not-so-subtly trying to hide a smile. Even Laxus, who had looked wilted a second before, raised his eyebrows and looked at his father and his friend with a bit of delight. The sight of it almost warmed Freed's heart, and he took a step towards Ivan. He recalled how Adilah walked, imposing, with her shoulders back and her arms behind her, and did the same.

Ivan furrowed his eyebrows together and took a hesitant step back. He stayed for another long, long moment, then went "pah," waved a hand, and slouched away. The people in the hall parted for him, like he was a virus.

"Dick," was all that Laxus had to say, and Freed choked back a fit of nervous laughter. He was very pleased with himself- a confrontation, and he hadn't killed anybody! He felt like he deserved an award, some trophy or ribbon, but reminded himself that the average person did not get gold stars for not murdering.

"I'll go make sure he doesn't rip apart the back room." Makarov sighed and patted Freed's leg again. "Not many people will stand up to Ivan like that, and even less get out of it without a black eye. Color me impressed, boy."

Freed sure felt impressed with himself when his knees started to go weak. He sat down slowly as the master excused himself, his heart still hammering and his mind still racing with a variety of terrible things he could do to Ivan, and found himself under the intense and burning stare of Laxus.

"Stop looking at me."

"You shouldn't have done that."

"Why not?"

He sighed and shook his head and mindlessly flipped through magazine pages. "My old man's a hardass who carries his grudges to his grave. Don't cross him like that again, or you'll have to be looking over your shoulder for a long time."

Freed scoffed. "You don't mean he'll try to kill me."

Laxus didn't respond, but instead looked like he'd suddenly remembered something and reached into his pocket. Out of it came a crumpled and sloppily folded paper, and he unfurled it and smoothed it onto the table. The top if it said "HELP NEEDED," right above the details: A band of dangerous rogues, taking their crime spree from the north to the south. "I need some help. I'd usually go solo, but this seems like a two-man job."

His eyes drifted down to the reward at the bottom, and he lifted an eyebrow: 150,000 Jewel. "Why bring me?"

Laxus shrugged. "I like you. We seem like we can get along. Everyone else here is basically an idiot."

With a sigh, he ran his fingers over the paper and snatched it up. "When do you want to leave?"

He stood and threw one hand on the table, the other jerked over his shoulder at the door. "Now."

Across the guildhall, a boy peeked from around the corner of a pillar, a grin pulling at the corners of his mouth. He watched the other two boys pick up their things and head for the doors, then picked up his own bag, nearly bursting with travel supplies, and whistled as he followed very far behind them.

It was time to get the show on the road.


End file.
